Food & Water

Postcard From Eastern Oregon: When planting food is illegal

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This Spring my farming partners and I found ourselves landless…Last year I wrote an article, “Who Will Feed The People?”, discussing the challenges to small-scale agriculture in the United States, such as lack of equipment, knowledge, financial resources, and markets; the polluted wasteland left behind by conventional farming; increasingly volatile and unpredictable weather patterns brought by Climate Change; and, last but not least, the social barriers: people of the U.S. are by and large uninterested in significant changes to the socio-economic status quo, and resist cutting edge projects.

The most wonderful (gardening) time of the year

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Growing a garden during the regular summer season here in Oklahoma can be a slog of uncomfortable heat and drought. 114+ temperatures, weeks without rain…painful. Without our reliable perennial fruit trees, some of us would grow little at all. Many Oklahoma farmers and gardeners have even begun muttering about giving up completely on the summer garden. But the fall season? Now, that’s a different story.

Canning Tomatoes 101

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We do a lot of canning here, especially with tomatoes. We harvest several hundred pounds every year with most of it being preserved. This year I’ve been getting a lot of questions about canning and tomatoes seem to the most popular.

Review: Too Much Magic by James Kunstler

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…Kunstler has a new work of social criticism titled Too Much Magic, his first nonfiction book since The Long Emergency came out in 2005. The book is an inquiry into a skewed, delusional perception of reality that Kunstler thinks has become “baseline normal for the American public lately.” Americans, he says, have been led astray by the incredible technological advancements of recent times. We’ve come to believe that any problem we face is solvable—as if by magic—with the application of some new technology.

Regenerative Adelaide

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An urbanizing world requires major policy initiatives to make urban resource use compatible with the world’s ecosystems. Metropolitan Adelaide has adopted this agenda and is well on its way to becoming a pioneering regenerative city region. New policies by the government of South Australia on energy efficiency, renewable energy, sustainable transport, zero waste, organic waste composting, water efficiency, wastewater irrigation of crops, peri-urban agriculture, and reforestation have taken Adelaide to the forefront of eco-friendly urban development. Working as a thinker in residence in Adelaide in 2003, I proposed linking policies to reduce urban eco-footprints and resource use with the challenge of building a green economy.

Is the end of cheap food just an agricultural problem?

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Larry Elliot writes in the Gaurdian that ‘the era of cheap food may be over’. He’s absolutely right in one crucial fact; the world faces some tough decisions. Aside from that, however, this was an article from a business desk: a lightened version of human and environmental damage and a broken agricultural system that agricultural solutions will fix. But it’s the wider problem that needs to be addressed.

Our years of magical thinking: interview with James Kunstler

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“Everybody’s got a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” — Mike Tyson

“That’s a pithy way of saying where our country, perhaps the developed world, is at right now,” notes author James Howard Kunstler. We’ve blown past the mileposts for global peak oil, says Kunstler in his new book, Too Much Magic: Wishful Thinking, Technology and the Fate of the Nation, and we expect technology to save us.

But the economy is getting better and better!

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Shockingly (or not so much, if you read here regularly), despite the supposed improvements in the economy, more and more American families are struggling to put meals on the table. The USDA reports a record 46.7 million American households are on food stamps. 17.9 % of American households (up 700,000 from 2010) didn’t have enough food at least some of the time.